The Postal Service receives daily a large amount of bound mail pieces, magazines, catalogs, brochures and other similar flat items for opening, sorting and subsequent delivery. These items arrive in a variety of forms including stretch wrapped pallets stacked with bundles (see FIG. 1), loose flats in postal trays, large bags of loose flats, and many other specialized containers, and are typically bound in bundles with combinations of plastic wraps and straps. The straps may be inside or outside of the plastic wrap. Before the items can be delivered to their specific addresses, the bundles and trays need to be opened, sorted, and delivered to a mail carrier.
The process of debundling, namely, the removal of the plastic wrap and/or straps from the bundles, has traditionally been done manually by an operator. See for example FIG. 2 showing a manual debundling station including a work surface for supporting the film wrapped bundles of flat articles to be sorted, an inclined surface on which the bundles are sliding toward the operator, and a bin for wrap and strap disposal. Generally, the operator picks up the bundle and manually cuts the straps and the plastic wrap using a hand held knife. The operator then removes the remnants of the wrap and straps and places the stack of loose items on a cart or a conveyable bucket for subsequent processing. This manual debundling process is both time consuming, expensive, prone to cause personal injuries to the operator (carpel tunnel syndrome, cuts, etc.), and it slows down the sorting process, which is normally highly automated. Also, generally the plastic wrap and the straps are cut on top of the bundle which then requires the operator to lift or move the bundle sideways to remove the wrapping and the straps from the bundle. Such a removal not only requires application of an additional force to lift or move the bundle to be able to remove the wrapping and the straps but also destroys the integrity of the loose bundle.